January 2005 Archives

Ever thought it is possible that anything worse than the tax man exists? I found out yesterday that there is one thing lower than lobster excretions, worse than the tax man...

I guess there would be three groups of Java developers out there - those who know about exceptions but have never heard of checked and unchecked exceptions, those who know what it is but do not understand them and those who truly know and understand them. My educated guess is that most people fall in the former two categories. This article will try and explain the differences between the two kinds of exceptions, as well as when to use which.

I think most developers assume that the more years they write code, the better they become. I have a very different measure for whether you are really bettering yourself.

Ask yourself this, and answer honestly:

With every new project you successfully complete, do you feel that the previous project was not done as good as the one just finished? Do you have an urge to open that previous project and bring it to the same standards as the latest project? Or do you feel that both projects have been created equally?

If your answer is the latter, I am sorry but you are not growing. No matter how good you are.

Everybody knows that SPAM caused the IT industry to respond with content filtering techniques and SPAM blocking techniques to help control this useless waste of bandwidth and irritation factor.

Same with large files. Bored employees are sending lots of 1MB+ mails containing the latest movie or powerpoint presentation of some joke. This obviously does not help the IT budget. So they either block certain content such as MPEG files or park them for late delivery.

What about employees visiting non-work related web sites? Surfing non-business related web sites wastes available bandwidth for important business related work. So IT departments block access to sites not deemed work related. And here I started discovering the first encounter what I now call "IT paranoia". At a large company I sometimes consult for, which houses easily a hundered developers - many of which write code in Java, I once tried to browse for information on one of the well known java sites. Their proxy server denied me access because it was non-business related. This impeded quite a bit on my productivity.

Then on another occasion I tried to send an email to one of their employees - whose surname is de Jesus. I said something to the lines of:

Dear Mr. De Jesus,

...

I got a mail from their Mail Marshall telling me that the email was blocked due to bad language. And the word was "Jesus".

Then today, I sent an email to an employee of another company. My mail contained this:

... or something more kinky, at least ...

I got this response:

I was quite impressed to receive the publisher's response to my list of errors in the text of the book "Professional Techniques for Digital Wedding Photographers, 2nd edition". I'll paste it below...

I have just now received an SMS from Chas Everitt - the estate agency. But first some background. I recently (2 months ago) sold my old home and bought a new one. The old one I sold through Chass Everitt, the new one I bought directly from Urban Constructions - the developers.

Anyways, the SMS promoted a new townhouse for sale - as if I am interested!!!!! I mean - I just spend the most money I have ever spent on a new house - barely 2 months old, and now they want to sell another house to me? This is down right stupid, blind and irritating.

Sounds like a paradox? Nope - I don't think so. What does it really matter if you are brilliant at your work in the IT industry, specifically?

When should you perform input validation, and how thorough should you be? This is a question many developers are struggling with.

I am pretty sure once you transcend the youth phase of software development, and you start thinking about what you are actually doing whilst writing code, you'll start running into tough decisions such as when to throw an exception, and when to return null.